Gillian Armstrong - Director

Nationality:
Australian.
Born:
Melbourne, 18 December 1950.
Education:
Swinburne College, studied filmmaking at Melbourne and Australian Film
and Television School, Sydney.
Family:
Married, one daughter.
Career:
Worked as production assistant, editor, art director, and assistant
designer, and directed several short films, 1970s; directed her first
feature,
My Brilliant Career
, 1979; directed her first American film,
Mrs. Soffel
, 1984; returned to Australia to direct
High Tide
, 1987; has since made films both in Australia and the United States; also
director of documentaries and commercials.
Awards:
Best Short Fiction Film Sydney International Film Festival,

Gillian Armstrong

for
The Singer and the Dancer
, 1976; British Critics' Award and Best Film and Best Director,
Australian Film Institute Awards, for
My Brilliant Career
, 1979; Women in Film Award, 1995.
Agent:
Judy Scott-Fox, William Morris Agency, 151 El Camino Drive, Beverly
Hills, CA 90212.

While women directors in film industries around the world are still seen
as anomalous (if mainstream) or marginalized as avant garde, the Antipodes
have been home to an impressive cadre of female filmmakers who negotiate
and transcend such notions. Before the promising debuts of Ann Turner (
Celia
) and Jane Campion (
Sweetie
), Gillian Armstrong blazed a trail with
My Brilliant Career
, launching a brilliant career of her own as an international director.
Like Turner and Campion, Armstrong makes films that resist easy
categorization as either "women's films" or
Australian ones. Her films mix and intermingle genres in ways that
undermine and illuminate afresh, if not openly subvert, filmic
conventions—as much as the films of her
male compatriots, like Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, or Paul Cox.
Formally, however, the pleasures of her films are traditional ones, such
as sensitive and delicate cinematography, fluid editing, an evocative feel
for setting and costume, and most importantly, a commitment to solid
character development and acting. All in all, her work reminds one of the
best of classical Hollywood cinema, and the question of whether her aim is
parody or homage is often left pleasingly ambiguous.

Although Armstrong has often spoken in interviews about her discomfort at
being confined to the category of woman filmmaker of women's films,
and has articulated her desire to reach an audience of both genders and
all nationalities, her work continually addresses sexual politics and
family tensions. Escape from and struggle with traditional sex roles and
the pitfalls and triumphs therein are themes frequently addressed in her
films—from
One Hundred a Day
, her final-year project at the Australian Film and Television School,
through
My Brilliant Career
, her first feature, to
High Tide
and
Oscar and Lucinda.
Even one of her earliest films at Swinburne College, the short
Roof Needs Mowing
, obliquely tackled this theme, using a typical student filmmaker's
pastiche of advertising and surrealism. Like most maturing filmmakers with
an eye on wider distribution, Armstrong dropped the "sur"
from surrealism in her later work, so that by
One Hundred a Day
—an adaptation of an Alan Marshall story about a shoe-factory
employee getting a back-street abortion in the 1930s—she developed
a more naturalistic handling of material, while her use of soundtrack and
fast editing remained highly stylized and effective.

Made on a tiny budget and heavily subsidized by the Australian Film
Commission, the award-winning
The Singer and the Dancer
was a precocious study of the toll men take on women's lives that
marked the onset of Armstrong's mature style. On the strength of
this and
One Hundred a Day
, producer Margaret Fink offered Armstrong the direction of
My Brilliant Career.
Daunted at first by the scale of the project and a lack of confidence in
her own abilities, she accepted because she "thought it could be
bungled by a lot of men."

While
The Singer and the Dancer
had been chastised by feminist critics for its downbeat ending, in which
the heroine returns to her philandering lover after a half-hearted escape
attempt,
My Brilliant Career
was widely celebrated for its feminist fairy-tale story as well as its
employment of women crew members. Adapted from Miles Franklin's
semi-autobiographical novel,
My Brilliant Career
, with its turn-of-the-20th-century setting in the Australian outback,
works like
Jane Eyre
in reverse (she does not marry him), while retaining the romantic allure
of such a story and all the glossy production values of a period setting
that Australian cinema had been known for up until then. Distinguished by
an astonishing central performance by the then-unknown Judy Davis (fresh
from playing Juliet to Mel Gibson's Romeo on the drama-school
stage), the film managed to present a positive model of feminine
independence without belying the time in which it was set. Like
Armstrong's later
Mrs. Soffel
,
My Brilliant Career
potently evokes smothered sensuality and conveys sexual tension by small,
telling details, as in the boating scene.

Sadly, few of Armstrong's later films have been awarded
commensurate critical praise or been as widely successful, possibly
because of her refusal to conform to expectations and churn out more
upbeat costume dramas. Her next feature,
Starstruck
, although it too features a spunky, ambitious heroine, was a rock musical
set in the present and displaying a veritable rattle bag of
influences—including Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney
"lets-put-on-a-show" films, Richard Lester editing
techniques, new wave pop videos, and even Sternberg's
Blond Venus
, when the heroine sheds her kangaroo suit to sing her "torch
song" à la Marlene Dietrich. Despite a witty script and fine
bit characters, the music is somewhat monotonous, and the film was only
mildly successful.

Armstrong's first film to be financed and filmed in America was
Mrs. Soffel.
Based on a true story and set at the turn of the century, it delineated
the tragic story of the eponymous warden's wife who falls in love
with a convict, helps him escape, and finally runs off with him. The
bleak, monochrome cinematography is powerfully atmospheric but was not to
all reviewers' tastes, especially in America. For Armstrong, the
restricted palette was quite deliberate, so that the penultimate images of
blood on snow would be all the more striking and effective. A sadly
underrated film, it features some unexpectedly fine performances from
Diane Keaton in the title role, Mel Gibson as her paramour (a fair
impersonation of young Henry Fonda), and the young Matthew Modine as his
kid brother. At its best, it recalls, if not
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
, then at least
Bonnie and Clyde. High Tide
returns to Australia for its setting in a coastal caravan park, and comes
up trumps as an unabashedly sentimental weepie, and none the worse for it.
It features three generations of women: Lilli (Judy Davis again), backup
singer to an Elvis impersonator and drifter; Ally (Claudia Karvan), the
pubescent daughter she left behind; and mother-in-law Bet (Jan Adele), who
vies with Lilli for Ally's affections. In terms of camera work, it
is one of Armstrong's most restless films, utilizing nervous zip
pans, fast tracking, and boomshots, and then resting for quiet, intense
close-ups on surfboards, legs being shaved, and shower nozzles, all highly
motivated by the characters' perspectives. Like
Mrs. Soffel
,
High Tide
uses colors symbolically to contrast the gentle tones of the
seaside's natural landscape with the garish buildings of the town
called Eden.

Armstrong wears her feminist credentials lightly, never on her sleeve.
Nevertheless, her early fiction films can be seen as charting over the
years the trajectory of the women's movement:
My Brilliant Career
celebrated women's independence, as Sybylla rejects the roles of
wife and mother;
Mrs. Soffel
reopens negotiations with men (with tragic results); and, finally,
High Tide
returns to the rejected motherhood role, with all its attendant joys and
anxieties.

Fires Within
, Armstrong's first 1990s release, is a well-meaning but insipid
tale of a Cuban political prisoner and his encounter with his family in
Miami. A fiasco, Armstrong lost control of the project during
post-production. The filmmaker bounced back strongly, however, with two
impressive films centering on the relationships between female siblings.
The Last Days of Chez Nous
, which Armstrong directed back in Australia, is a thoughtful, well-acted
drama focusing on the emotional plight of a pair of sisters. One (Lisa
Harrow) is a bossy, fortysomething writer, and the other (Kerry Fox) has
just emerged from an unhappy love affair. The scenario centers on events
that take place after the latter becomes romantically involved with the
former's husband (Bruno Ganz). The film's major strength is
the depth and richness of its female characters. Its theme, consistent
with Armstrong's best previous work, is the utter necessity of
women's self-sufficiency.

Little Women
, based on Louisa May Alcott's venerable 1868 novel of four devoted
sisters coming of age in Concord, Massachusetts, during the Civil War, was
Armstrong's first successful American-made film. It may be linked
to
My Brilliant Career
as a story of feminine independence set in a previous era.
Alcott's book had been filmed a number of times before: a silent
version, made in 1918; most enjoyably by George Cukor, with Katharine
Hepburn, in 1933; far less successfully, with a young Elizabeth Taylor
(among others), in 1949; and in a made-for-TV movie in 1978.
Armstrong's version is
every bit as fine as the Cukor-Hepburn classic. Her cast is just about
perfect, with Wynona Ryder deservedly earning an Academy Award nomination
as the headstrong Jo March. Ryder is ably supported by Trini Alvarado,
Claire Danes, Samantha Mathis, and Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon
offers her usual solid performance as Marmee, the March girls'
mother. If the film has one fault, it is the contemporary-sounding
feminist rhetoric that Marmee spouts: the dialogue is completely out of
sync with the spirit and reality of the times. But this is just a quibble.
This new
Little Women
is a fine film, at once literate and extremely enjoyable.

In her next film,
Oscar and Lucinda
, Armstrong contrasts a strong feminist heroine and a hero who is
"sensitive" to the point of being effeminate. The film is a
Victorian-era romantic adventure, and the title characters are shy,
guilt-ridden Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes) and intensely strong-willed
Lucinda Leplastrier (Cate Blanchett). The two are soul mates who share an
obsession with gambling, and their natures do not allow them to assume the
accepted, traditional male and female societal roles.

The first section of the film charts the parallel stories of Oscar and
Lucinda, and how they evolve as individuals. Lucinda is oblivious to what
others think of her as she expresses herself—and she even boldly
dresses in pants. Oscar, meanwhile, suffers a traumatic childhood and
remains estranged from his father. Approximately 40 minutes into the story
the characters meet, and quickly discover that they are kindred spirits.
Lucinda's sense of independence does impact positively on Oscar,
but not enough to allow him to free himself from his mental shackles. A
childhood shock has made Oscar fearful of water, and his religious
upbringing forces him to equate pleasure with sin. So it is not without
irony that he is fated to drown while trapped inside a church that has
been made of glass; the structure is set on a raft that had been floating
down a river.

Armstrong fills
Oscar and Lucinda
with a strong sense of the opposing forces that prevent the characters
from adding to the foundation of their relationship. Guilt, fear, and the
constraints of religion are what imprison Oscar; they are contrasted to
the spirit, individuality, and freedom that personify Lucinda. By
depicting Oscar as incorrigibly ineffectual, Armstrong's purpose is
neither to lampoon masculinity nor to cram the film with one-dimensional
feminist ire. Instead, she lucidly points out how a male-female
relationship is hollow (if not altogether doomed) if both participants
fail to connect on equal terms. The twist of the story is that, here, the
male is submissive while the female is aggressive.

—Leslie Felperin, updated by Rob Edelman

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